Ordeal

Since the start of the current semester, the Yale Cabaret has been on a roll. Each week has given audiences another provocative offering. This weekend the play is Yaël Farber’s He Left Quietly, which dramatizes the ordeal of Duma Kumalo, an inmate condemned to death row in apartheid South Africa for an act of mob violence in which he did not participate. Rather, he was arrested and condemned for political rather than criminal reasons. Kumalo served three years, awaiting death and enduring the dehumanizing and humiliating treatment of his captors, only to be reprieved, due to public pressure, from hanging (he had already been measured for the noose and his coffin) less than 24 hours before his time. After another four years he was released, only to experience the stigma of being a former prisoner who was never cleared of the crime. As originally staged, from 2002 until Kumalo’s death in 2006, He Left Quietly featured Kumalo himself. The play was produced as a docu-drama, with Kumalo telling his own scripted story while a professional actor would play “Young Duma,” acting out, mostly in mime, the events Kumalo describes, and a female actor would play “Woman”—a part that at times represents Farber herself, at other times the agents of the government, or a narrative voice. As staged at the Cabaret, directed by Leora Morris, all three parts are played by second-year actors at YSD.

Playing Duma, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II creates a sense of a man who has come through a harrowing ordeal both wiser and humbler. He begins by asking “how many times can a man die” and when the actual moment of death occurs. The main thrust of the show is not, as we might assume, indignity and political outrage, but rather the kind of insight that comes from having faced death and lived. In presenting his experiences as theater, Duma seems to have gained a philosophical detachment that makes him a benign narrative presence recounting what comes to seem a ritual cleansing: stripping away the accoutrements of the everyday—a scene in which Young Duma buys a pair of stylish shoes that, unknown to him at the time, he would wear only once: to be sentenced to death, establishes an “all is vanity” tone that Duma chuckles about; then the humiliations—such as a prison uniform deliberately too small—and the existential reminders, as current inmates wear the uniforms and sleep in the bedclothes, unlaundered, of those already killed; finally, the surrendering even of one’s attachment to life, as Duma says his goodbyes to his father and other loved ones and accepts the unique date with death we all inevitably face. The reprieve comes as almost a taunt, a way of showing that he is indeed a puppet on the strings of the State. Abdul-Mateen maintains such a dignified and knowing air that we see not a man consumed by suffering but rather one ennobled by it.

On a plain wooden stage set with a couple chairs, a primitive toilet, and a pile of shoes, backed with a chain-link face, He Left Quietly makes the most of its ritualistic overtones, even as it gives full drama to Duma’s individual plight. Enacting the range of emotions Duma endures—such as rage at his former lover, wracking sobs at his own fate, and, very movingly, teary solidarity in song for Lucky, a comrade gone to the gallows—Ato Blankson-Wood continues to impress viewers. The final tableau of Blankson-Wood silhouetted against the wall/fence, looking off, acts as a comment on the entire story of Kumalo, as a man who, once imprisoned unjustly then returned to the world of apartheid, must endure years under the shadow of the system that condemned him, while eventually taking control of his story as a tale to be told, and enacted again and again, for audiences. Without Kumalo’s own presence in the play, the play becomes more theater than document, so that we may find in it, as with any play, meanings that go beyond the actual events of Kumalo’s life.

From that point of view, the weakest aspect of the play is the role of Woman. Maura Hooper does a bravura job of playing sympathetic witness, indifferent judge, and other roles, but the part as written comes to seem a bit too contrived, a theatrical touch rather than a direct reflection of Kumalo’s experience—which is never true of Duma’s descriptions or Young Duma’s enactments.

Stark, unsettling, but ultimately redemptive, He Left Quietly makes its audience bear witness to the many unsung songs of political prisoners and unjust executions in our world. It is to Farber and Kumalo’s credit that they can convey both the extraordinary circumstances of Kumalo’s story as well as the more general existential condition we all face, and, most tellingly, the very real threat of political reprisals by the state’s arbitrary violence—never more fearsome and pitiless than when sanctioned by the law of the land.

He Left Quietly By Yaël Farber Directed by Leora Morris

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Christopher Thompson; Lights: Andrew Griffin; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Reid Thompson; Technical Director: Mitchell Cramond, Mitch Massaro; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Producer: Libby Peterson

Yale Cabaret February 27-March 1, 2014

Making Magic

The New Haven Theater Company has had a run of revivals, with the two most recent—Our Town and Almost, Maine—staged at the English Markets. Next month—actually, next week—finds them going for something the company, in its twenty year history, has never done: an original play. The Magician, written by NHTC member Drew Gray, was given a staged reading last August and is now ready for a full premiere.

The story of a magician, Mark Wonderton, working “the big time” in a casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the play is one of a trio of plays that Gray has written about three brothers—one a thief, one a magician, one a gambler—and, for The Magician, was drawn to the idea of a play that would portray a performer onstage. Thus the staging of Act II—when Wonderton is onstage—entails the interesting doubling that takes place when a play’s audience doubles as the audience to a show in the play. To that end, NHTC has had to find a few tricks up its sleeve in order to pull off some actual magic tricks.

“Some will fail,” Gray says, but the audience should have a sense of Wonderton as “a polished performer having a bad night,” rather than, say, a middling magician. One of the reasons for Wonderton’s lackluster performance of his routine has to do with his own crisis, another has to do with news of one of his brothers. In the reading in August, Gray says, most of the audience emerged from the experience feeling “the emphasis of the play” was on Wonderton’s reaction to his brother’s fate. For Gray, the story to be told uses that event as “an instigating act,” the catalyst that causes the magician’s state of mind, but not the dominant feature of the play or of Wonderton’s situation.

“There’s a different ending entirely” now, Gray says, thought the emphasis is still on Mark Wonderton as a guy onstage having to go on with the show though his heart isn’t in it. It’s a situation with interesting dramatic parallels to the situation of acting. Gray, who is also directing the play and is responsible for scenic design as well, does everything—we can say—but act. The Magician explores the plight of the showman stuck in his show, no matter what.

Much of the play’s success, Gray feels, depends on “educating the audience in the first ten minutes about what is possible and potential with Mark.” Act I is mostly backstage, a dialogue between Wonderton and his voluble manager, Ronnie. Gray has cast two of the more versatile actors of the company, with George Kulp as Mark and Peter Chenot as Ronnie. Much relies on Kulp’s ability to balance the unhinged qualities that Wonderton develops as the show goes on with the more staid and steadfast character that Kulp is a natural at rendering. The NHTC has a thing for dialogue-driven plays—the plays of David Mamet are a key inspiration—and The Magician is right up their alley in that regard with Mark and Ronnie trading off insults, wise-cracks, and comments on the state of the act and the state of their working relationship.

From an audience perspective, we may find ourselves hoping that Wonderton will succeed—after all, no one wants to see a performer bomb, not even if an actor is doing a good job of playing just that. Gray looks to “the unique experience of live theater” to provide “a true and interesting experience,” so that such tensions add to the play’s realism. The audience, like Wonderton himself, have to find out that “disappointment is acceptable.”

The Magician plays for the first two weekends in March at the English Markets on Chapel Street.

The New Haven Theater Company The Magician By Drew Gray Directed by Drew Gray

March 6-8 and 13-15 The English Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills will be remembered as the guy who, recently, transformed the viewing experience at the Yale Cabaret. As Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, he altered the playing space to create a deep thrust stage, doing away with the tendency to remake the place with every new play. In his production of The Maids, he goes further, creating a room, or rooms, within the room that is the Cabaret. The premise of this production is that the audience are voyeurs and eavesdroppers, positioned outside panes of glass, spying on what happens in someone’s apartment.

Whose apartment? Why, Madame’s. And exactly what are her maids, Solange and Claire, getting up to while their mistress is away? Solange plays Claire and Claire plays Madame. The point of the masquerade is that moment when the two, nearly fainting for a love they dare not give in to, bond in the death of someone—most likely (the real) Madame. Add to this the fact that Solange may or may not want her sister to die (as Madame), or may or may not want to die as her sister (dying with Madame). In other words, the world of The Maids is a world where desire and death (together) are the thrills. All the rest is masquerade.

Wills’ production adds an extra dimension to this dress-up game. Traditionally played with a cast of three female actors, The Maids was conceived by its author, Jean Genet, as enacted by a trio of male actors playing women. In following this intention, Wills’ The Maids becomes a drag show of sorts, with men masquerading as women, but this dimension also makes The Maids an even more complex play because we are watching men playact men who are playacting women. Wills’ cast begins in high camp and I’m sure a few playgoers seeing the play for the first time might assume they are watching a gay sex farce. Chris Bannow (Solange/Claire) and Mickey Theis (Claire/Madame) enact their parts with a kind of personal theatricality that we are encouraged to think is what goes on behind closed doors—and undraped windows—with these two, able to “act out” in private. Privy to this playacting within the play, we can only begin to determine its point as we watch, trying hard to follow the action and the whispers, as the pair, early on glad only in “tighty whities,” move about Kate Noll’s sumptuously tacky interior space.

Bannow and Theis are two of the most accomplished actors in the YSD program, and here they do some of the best work either has done. It’s not easy suggesting the subtle psycho-sexual drama between these two “sisters,” moving through a range of moods—passionate, bitchy, frightened, bullying, beseeching—but that is what this play requires. Bannow’s Solange is who we meet first, performing autoerotic acts solo—the entire play is in some ways a protracted sexual fantasy that is also an examination of power relations between classes and within gender. Much of the struggle here is between Claire and Solange who enact everything from sibling rivalry to lovers’ tiffs to actors’ differences of artistic vision. It’s all in the game. As the prettier one, who should be the object of Madame’s unspoken homoerotic desire, Theis’s performance is something of a revelation, as he finds, as it were, his inner little girl. As Madame, first-year actor Andrew Burnap has a regal height and a distracted air, but doesn’t quite seem the mistress of this threesome.

About the staging: Wills’ decision to enclose the playing space stems from his view that sight-lines in the Cab are always a problem. Certainly there is rarely the full frontal presentation common to most theaters. Here, the Cab’s strongest feature—the fact that the audience and the players occupy the same space—is obviated in striking fashion. Bold, innovative, the design for The Maids makes a drama out of our efforts to see the drama. What you see at the Cab is often dependent on your vantage point but, here, some vantages afford a view of the action on camera, as though watching a surveillance stream.

No more telling staging of how we pry—the idea of our age as one lacking in any sense of privacy is common—could be imagined. The implications about private life and the public imagining of intimacy provide a layer of suggestion to The Maids that goes beyond the old upstairs/downstairs dichotomy that can seem a bit stuffy by now. Inspired and arresting, The Maids is unsavory and seductive, making us all somewhat suspect, like people watching other people watch other people have sex.

The Maids By Jean Genet Directed by Dustin Wills

Dramaturg: Tanya Dean; Set: Kate Noll; Lights: Oliver Wason; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Costumes: Hunter Kaczorowski; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Stage Manager: Molly Henninghausen; Producer: Lauren Wainwright; Creative Consultants: Michelle McGregor, Sophie von Haselberg; Sound Mixer: Sinan Zafar; Carpenters: Nick Vogelpohl, Sean Walters

The Yale Cabaret February 20-22, 2014

Spies in Our Midst

With the ramifications about the NSA commanding commentary in various places, the question of a government spying on the private lives of citizens—through phones and internet—has become a major concern of our day, here in the free world. But what about government spying on the public lives of performers, via infiltration of theater groups? The latter is the subject matter of Theatre of the 8th Day’s The Files, playing as part of the No Boundaries series at the Iseman Theater under the auspices of the Yale Rep.

Theatre of the Eighth Day has existed since the Sixties, staging revolutionary theater pieces in their native Poland. In the Seventies and Eighties, in particular, they were the target of the socialist government’s efforts to eradicate the group. In the 2000s, the group gained access to the files that were kept on them and their activities by the government. The descriptions of the group’s members and its projects, as seen through the eyes of the group’s political nemeses, make up the bulk of The Files (2007), interspersed with film or video clips and brief enactments from some of the group’s performances, that act as the highlights of the piece.

Sitting at individual podiums reading to the audience from edited versions of the transcripts—translated into English—seems an unusually static presentation for the Eighth Day. Occasionally, to break up the austere tone, members of the group will enter a space in the center to act out—using the group’s skill at physical humor and expression—scenes that comment upon the view of their activities offered by the officialese of the reports. For instance, one amusing sequence had three male members of the troupe (Adam Borowski, Tadeusz Janiszewski, Marcin Kȩszycki) enacting a series of frisks and contortions that escalated as Ewa Wójciak read a document containing a dizzying account of how a Special Agent would infiltrate the group and bring about certain frictions from within.

The idea that government agents felt they could impersonate revolutionary actors well enough to be accepted seems rather ironic at this distance. One has to imagine agents out-acting the actors to some extent, playing at the roles the others are committed to performing. The odd theatricality of all this imposture and pretending is what seems to best call out for a project like The Files. In the hands of the Eighth Day, their files become the basis for an exploration of their own theatricality as viewed through an audience that is already convinced of the group’s political significance. As much or more than critics and the general public, the agents of the state attended rehearsals and performances so as to see the state flouted. They wanted evidence of anti-socialist messages and of views and theories inimical to state control. They also were partial to hamstrung observations about the creative process.

What is perhaps most amusing in the show is the way the agents interpret the personalities of the cast (each is introduced via photos and descriptions on file) and the aims of the group. Asides, such as how unpredictable the group’s drunken orgies are, work their way into the reports so that we get an oddly objective record of the Eighth Day in its heyday, from an insider/outsider perspective. Whatever the realities of the threats and harassment, in retrospect the surveillance seems almost benign. This is particularly the case when one considers that the sense of Eighth Day’s importance—should we suspect that they may be heroicizing their state-baiting and revolutionary ferment—is supported by these at times irritated accounts of their methods and their goals and their following.

As a retrospect, then, The Files gives viewers a sense of the times the group lived through, together with certain “greatest hits”-like segments from their productions—foregrounding the group’s great command of ensemble work that goes beyond “acting” per se to the kinds of impersonating and personifying that make political allegory so effective. In personifying the threats of and to the Theater of the Eighth Day, the Theater of the Eighth Day re-stages the struggle. This is not a museum piece or a tribute to a job well-done. As expressed by the cast in the Talk Back after the show, the current conditions in democratic Poland, with an extremist right-wing on the upswing, are in some ways more demoralizing than the totalitarian state Theater of the Eighth Day was formed to combat. In the former Poland, the effort to control all expression could only act as an incentive to creative spirits such as the members of the Theatre of Eighth Day. In the current climate, it may be easier for a political message to be lost in the leveling that democratic institutions impose on the arts. Everything has a voice, and so it’s harder for the important voices to be heard.

Speaking of voices, the thought that occurred to me a few times while watching the show was: “who were the people supplying these descriptions of the group’s activities?” One tries to imagine them, based on their testimony of what they saw and experienced. It’s an interesting aspect of the show that it incorporates the words of people who must remain anonymous, their identities hidden behind code names, their prose speaking to us of the partyline, of the assumed and assured position of the agent. The writers have no identities because they have, deliberately, no individuality. And yet their words, at times, are not so different from the kinds of press release-inspired, re-purposed reports of the free press. Whether in a democratic or totalitarian country, artists with urgent messages such as the Theatre of the Eighth Day must be vigilant to avoid becoming a creature of their “credits.”

The Files By Theatre of the Eighth Day (Teatr Ósmego Dnia) Written by Ewa Wójciak and Katarzyna Madon-Mitzner Directed by Theatre of the Eighth Day

Performed by Adam Borowski, Tadeusz Janiszewski, Marcin Kȩszycki, Ewa Wójciak Visual Design by Jacek Chmaj

Yale Repertory Theatre February 20-22, 2014

Herzog Back in New Haven

Tomorrow night at the Long Wharf Theatre, Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles begins previews, with its official opening next Wednesday, February 26th. Herzog, a graduate of of the Yale School of Drama and Yale College, debuted her play Belleville at the Yale Rep in 2011. Now, the well-respected slightly earlier play 4000 Miles, directed by Long Wharf's associate artistic director Eric Ting, gets its chance in New Haven. Produced at Lincoln Center Theater’s New Works program in 2011, the play won an OBIE Award in 2012 for Best New American Play and was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2013. The story of an inter-generational odd couple, of sorts, the play depicts the bonds and frictions between Leo, a twenty-one-year-old man, and Vera, his ninety-one-year-old grandmother. That difference in age means that, though family, the two characters have rather different assumptions about the world they live in. Leo has come to New York City, biking 4000 miles cross-country from Seattle to reconnect with Bec, a girl who may be through with him, and is grieving after a friend’s unexpected death, and Vera happens to have some space he can use.

To Herzog, it’s a bit surprising that the play has become so popular in regional theater—besides going up at the Long Wharf, 4000 Miles is currently being staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park as well. “It has little plot and is mainly a dialogue-based character piece,” Herzog says, but those qualities may be part of what makes it so popular. Given that character studies are a major interest of theater, a story that brings together different generations in a meaningful way seems tailor-made for regional theater, where the majority of patrons have seen more than a few decades of life and where, as in New Haven, younger theater-goers are apt to be involved in theater themselves.  Set in 2007, 4000 Miles features a character based on a cousin several years younger than Herzog when she wrote the play—Leo's at an age when many are trying to decide their direction in life and what kind of life makes sense to them. Encountering a much older family member with very definite views on the world sets up many opportunities for the characters to reveal and discover things about themselves in small but significant ways. And that tends to make for fascinating theater.

Writing the play, for Herzog, was an effort to pay tribute to her own grandmother, who saw the play more than once, calling it “an eerie out of body experience” to see a character on-stage “lifted from her own stories.” Both Vera and Herzog’s grandmother share a past as communists in the post-World War II era, a time when persons of their political persuasion suffered much “red-baiting” and, when possible, prosecution. While a character like Vera is “necessarily engaged with political questions,” Herzog is uncertain that a domestic drama like 4000 Miles can really be called “political,” as some critics have done. With her own grandmother in mind, Herzog suggests that 4000 Miles and her earlier play After the Revolution “may have gained a political reputation unfairly.” Vera, a character in both plays, espouses communism, while her husband, recently deceased in the earlier play, was blacklisted and an actual Soviet spy. Yet Herzog questions whether her own grandmother’s stress on the importance of political art is met by her granddaughter’s plays. Herzog prefers to avoid “art with a sole message,” and rather considers her plays to be about characters with political views than plays with a particular political agenda. Her grandmother, on the other hand, felt that “art should have a political message.”

Thus part of the interest in the play is in how the values of Vera look to someone who has had none of her experiences—of the Depression, of the Second World War, of communist China, of McCarthyism, of the Vietnam War, of being devastated by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. For Leo’s generation, born in the mid-Eighties, Leftist sympathies are more likely to take the form of Green environmental issues and concerns with the global economy and its products, or perhaps with sexual freedoms and racial injustice. The play is not so much about a clash of ideologies as it is an observation about how different political climates create different kinds of responses in different generations. More to the point for Herzog, in terms of the play’s dynamics, is the theme of loss, as Leo “faces his first experience of real grief and finds questions about his life to look into.” Herzog intends her play, a comic drama, to be faithful to the kinds of interactions that can occur naturally but meaningfully between relatives thrown together by happenstance.

The other autobiographical feature of the play is that Herzog biked cross-country herself, right after graduation from Yale College in 2000, though, unlike Leo, east to west. While none of her experiences are directly incorporated in the play, she mentions a 4th of July celebration in a tiny town in Kansas that left an impression on her—a resident of the northeast all her life—in showing her a bit of small-town America at a time that was, in many ways, a turning-point in recent history.

With a sense of the vast area—4000 miles—that separates the coasts of our country—and the stretch of time—70 years—that separate the births of Vera and Leo, Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, contained in one room, offers viewers a chance to stake stock of their own sense of what separates us and joins us as inter-generational Americans.

4000 Miles By Amy Herzog Directed by Eric Ting

Long Wharf Theatre February 19 - March 16, 2014

A Room of One's Husband's Own

Carole Fréchette’s The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, directed by Cole Lewis and currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, plays upon not only the audience’s likening the play’s situation to the tale of Bluebeard but upon its characters doing so as well. While having free reign of a thirty-plus room mansion, Grace (Chasten Harmon) knows that her rich husband’s request that she never enter the little room up the hidden stairs recalls the story of Bluebeard. Her husband, Henry (Ryan Campbell), knows this as well and is disposed to joke about it, while remaining adamant about forbidding her entry to that one little room. In other words, Fréchette asks us to consider that, just because something is like something we read, that doesn’t mean it’s not really happening. But what is really happening? That may not be so easy to determine. Our entry into this world is through Grace, who Lewis and set designer Adrian Martinez Frausto place in the center of the playing space on a raised platform, as she acts out for us her temptation and her misgivings. Along each side of this platform are long banquet tables beneath chandeliers, very reminiscent of a kind of “Beauty and the Beast” set, so that we may expect some dark secret or special charm or horrible truth lurking in that little room (staged as a trapdoor in the ceiling).

At the head and foot of each banquet table, at which the audience members sit, are placed the other principals of the play. At one end sits Grace’s sister Anne (Elia Monte-Brown), a rather self-righteous worker against the ills of the world who belittles Grace’s materialistic marriage; at the other end sits Henry. On the other table, Jenny (Mariko Parker), Henry’s faithful housemaid sits, and, at the other end, Joyce (Elivia Bovenzi), mother of Anne and Grace, who is beside herself with delight at Grace’s marriage. Thus we have a very interesting and suggestive game of diagonals crossing at the heart of the space where Grace goes through her dark nights of the soul.

In Grace’s mind play conversations with Joyce, telling her to obey Henry and to not look a gift horse in the mouth, much less into a secret chamber; and with Anne, who mainly berates her for becoming yet another possession of a man she barely knows. Indeed, Henry is a rather unknowable character, the kind of symbol of masculinity that one minute showers her with kisses and flowers and the next stamps his foot and raises his voice (or brandishes an ax) when she gives too much attention to that one room.

The situation of the play is artfully staged in this production, and the mounting tension works well as each entry by Grace into the forbidden room becomes more harrowing, with effective use of darkness, sound effects, music, and dirt—the latter leaving a physical trace of Grace’s every trespass. What does she find in the room? The answer to that question is not so easy to give and that’s what keeps our interest—that, and what Henry will do when he finds out. For though Grace describes her experiences in the room, we don’t see any of what she claims to find. The fact that one of the rooms of the house is decorated “Vienna, 1900,” is a wry comment on the kinds of Freudian spaces we might expect Grace to be investigating.

So, yes, there is a psychological dimension to all this—what drives someone to do the one thing some patriarchal figure or other forbids. We can think of Eve as the figure for such trespass, but there’s also the fact that those “voices” of mother and sister are the very crutches apt to undermine that “cleaving to one’s partner” that marriage expects. In other words, Grace doesn’t only disobey Henry, she also betrays him by seeking help from others outside the marriage—this includes, astonishingly, the housekeeper, who of course betrays her to the Master (perhaps Grace needs to see next week’s Cab show The Maids to have a better feel for what she might expect from her maid when it comes to loyalty).

Questions—apt enough for a Valentine’s Day weekend show—about trust in relationships and the moral ambiguity of “one’s own space” is certainly sounded in all this (comparable matters like passwords to email and other accounts might flit through the audience’s mind at such moments, to say nothing of ‘girl’s’ or ‘guy’s’ nights out), but Fréchette has other things in mind that might be said to have more to do with Jane Eyre than with Bluebeard or The Beast and his Beauty. The “madwoman in the attic” of Rochester’s house was the figure that brought the house down, with, in Jean Rhys’ hands, the implication of colonial misdeeds in the backstory. The misdeeds figured in the attic of Fréchette’s house have much to do with Anne’s critique of her sister’s lifestyle, so that Henry, however blameless he is in the Bluebeard scenario, will never be blameless in Anne’s view of the world we live in.

The idea that Grace is not blameless either is figured largely by the somewhat cliché manner with which she courts Jenny, giving her jewelry and paying compliments about her skin. In fact, the Jenny subplot (if it can be called that) relies heavily on a Victorian sense of mistress-master-and-maid, while Joyce is a caricature of a social-climbing mother living vicariously through her daughter. Which is a way of saying that three of the four figures surrounding Grace’s central drama of conscience are very minor and barely articulated.

The real struggle is between Anne and Grace, and Elia Monte-Brown gives Anne a natural, easy-going moral superiority that only occasionally becomes strident and holier-than-thou; as Grace, Chasten Harmon delves deep to pull up the kind of cathartic power that convinces us her character’s mental and spiritual health is at stake. Center stage in this show is a woman wrestling with her demons and Harmon delivers—would that the playwright had delved a bit deeper to make those demons more distinctive.

The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs By Carole Fréchette Directed by Cole Lewis

Composer/Musician: Jenny Schmidt; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Producer: Charles Felix; Set: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costumes: KJ Kim; Lights: Oliver Wason; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly

Yale Cabaret February 13-15, 2014

And One to Grow On

Everyone knows that fairy tales are often cautionary stories, told to amuse children and to warn them, in make-believe fashion, about the pitfalls of life. Granted, it’s life with an uncanny edge to it and I suspect that more than one child has grown-up rather disappointed that real life isn’t like that. Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls takes us to a world that is like that—but it’s not just any world, it’s specifically 2005 in the former Soviet Socialists Republic of Russia, and that means that while her heroine Annie is trying to go about her business of re-russifying her Russian (it’s “rust” now, she says), she is met both with the folkloric elements of fairy tale—such as the well-known “wicked witch” figure called Baba Yaga who eats little children, cooking them in her big warm oven (of course), and who also suffers the curse of aging a year every time she is asked a question—and the realities of the “fairy tale” of a capitalist Russia. The combination of the two means that this is a weird world, where bears and tsars, to say nothing of whores and high fashion, are just part of the landscape, where the great desiderata is an apartment of one’s own “in the center” and where Prince Charming, for any Cinderella up from the ashes, is apt to be one of Russia’s newly constituted millionaires.

One of the strengths of this magical and compelling show is that we don’t quite know where it’s going. “Happily ever after” is generally the ending of fairy tales, but there’s a lot to get through to get there. And, in the end, you might disappear like you were never here.

What the play is best at—the mix of the contemporary and the fantastic—the staging at the Rep, in Christopher Ash’s bold and imaginative set design and Chad Raines’ varied sound design, brings to the fore, with doors that rise up from the floor, with a basket of potatoes that gets ambulatory, with a bone-crunching sound every time Baba Yaga (Felicity Jones) cringes at a question, with the ability to suggest a Russian disco, a shack in the woods, an entrance way between two apartments with shape-shifting alacrity, and, especially, with the storied and creepy clutter of Baba Yaga’s lair.

That’s where Annie (Emily Walton) stays because the lair is “really” the apartment of Annie’s Aunt Yaroslava, and Annie was sent there by her mother Olga (Jessica Jelliffe, in heavily-accented Russian-American speak) who ran off from Russia in the 1990s to escape antisemitism. Now, Olga sends her daughter back and, by the rules of fairy tale, that must mean there’s a score to settle. Kindly old Aunt Yaroslava, who hates questions, just loves fattening up her wide-eyed American niece . . .

If you’ve ever read fairy tales to children, then you probably know how much fun it is to play the wicked witch or godmother, and here Felicity Jones (always a pleasure) has the choice role of Baba Yaga/Yaroslava. She’s crafty, creepy, full of the unctiousness of the guardian who is looking after her charge with, all the while, that sense of her own agenda that is so obvious and yet so unreal. Jones is actually sympathetic if only because Annie is so trustingly clueless, in the best tradition of Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Either that dyevushka better get some sense (or grow some balls) or she deserves her place in auntie’s entrails.

As Annie, Walton does the “gosh and gee willikers” Shirley Temple bit fine but she never quite modulates into a knowing grasp of things, despite a make-over scene that shows off the resources of KJ Kim’s costumes. The what’s-what is left to her posse of grrrls; in director Rachel Chavkin’s hands, they’re like a mash-up of the Spice Girls and Pussy Riot, the punk styling of the latter provided (were there were more!) via composer Chad Raines, with the girls as a band off to the side, Greek chorus style.

Best at making Miroshnik’s tight lines zing is Stéphanie Hayes; she scores as Nastya, the voice of knowing negativity and a whore who, while not having exactly a heart-of-gold, is pressed into service by Annie as a “fairy godmother.” A high point is her telling of one of the Zavyetniye Skazki, or “forbidden folktales” in which a domestic (and patriarchal) “just-so” story becomes, in her hands, a story worthy of the feminist revisionism we should expect. And it’s great to see her pound those drums.

As Katya, Celeste Arias handles the Spice Girls part of the equation. She’s your basic gold-digger, c. 2005, with a cigarette-inflected voice and impossibly long bare legs atop impossibly high shoes, looking like she’s waiting to teeter into a bed owned by whoever has the most bread. It’s her fixation on “the Other Katya,” her sugar daddy’s daughter (Hayes again, with an expression like sweet dessert), that might be her undoing.

Then there’s Masha (Sofiya Akilova) as somewhere in between: she’s basically your put-upon girl-with-a-guy, and she still just wants to have fun, and maybe go to school. She tends to get the unenviable exposition role, but her tale of “Masha and the Bear” opens the show with a convincing sense of how a fairy tale can modulate into just another hard luck story you’re going to hear. And she totally rocks those red thigh-highs.

So, a self-centered Aunt who only appears to be looking out for you; or a friend who is married to a bear of a guy who abuses her and might even kill her; or another friend who is actually having an affair with the father of a girl she has befriended; or a parent who gives her child a task that will either lead to a sense of self-reliance, or make her a victim forever. These are situations that could happen anywhere, and their upshot is that there’s a time, everywhere, when “girls” have to become “adults.”

Miroshnik keeps the juggling between reality and fairy tale nimble and surprising, and Chavkin’s production lets both realms exist in the audience’s imagination, though at times it needs to be a bit more breathless. In the quick change world of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, we find that the old stories do indeed work in our contemporary world, and that girls will triumph—over their female elders and males (no real member of either group was actually harmed in the telling of this play)—if only they stick together and face facts, no matter how bizarre or hard to believe, and are willing to study things like cybernetics and mathematics.

As Annie reflects, Dorothy-like, late in the play: “Sometimes adults have to do things that are really effing hard!”

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls By Meg Miroshnik Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Scenic Designer: Christopher Ash; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Bradley King; Composer, Music Director, Sound Designer: Chad Raines; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Production Dramaturg: Amy Boratko; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan; Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre January 31-February 22, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson

Just Girls

The new play opening tomorrow night at the Yale Repertory Theatre, The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, was written by Meg Miroshnik who graduated from Yale School of Drama in 2011. The production is not a world premiere because Miroshnik’s first stop after leaving Yale was Atlanta where, as a recipient of the Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award, she was a resident for a year, during which time The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls was staged at the Alliance Theatre in 2012. Miroshnik had actually written the play before her final project at YSD, The Tall Girls, which was featured in the Carlotta Festival here in 2011, and that play will receive a professional staging at the Alliance this March, as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Kendeda Award. Both plays Miroshnik describes as “coming of age” stories, and both have in common—with “girls” in their titles—a focus on young women. Tall Girls, about a high school girls basketball team, has a single male role and Russian Girls has an all-female cast.

The story concerns a Russian girl, Annie, who returns to Moscow—from LA—in 2005, to brush-up on her language skills. She finds a Russia transformed by the trappings of capitalism (this is before the global economic downturn) where young women dominate. Miroshnik says that, at the time, life expectancy for Russian males was age 57, so that her perception (Russian Girls derives from time Miroshnik spent in Moscow in that period) was of a city overrun by “hyper-feminine women, considering themselves as commodities in the booming consumer culture.”

Against this boom backdrop, Russian Girls looks at the way fairytales contribute to female identity, exploring “character archetypes” as well as “comedy stereotypes.” Situations such as encountering a girl-eating witch or having a boyfriend who is a bear are part of the matters on hand. Miroshnik’s intention is to begin with an opening that is “80% real, 20% fairytale” then switching it so that fairytale dominates reality about 80%-20%. This transformation involves highly theatrical elements that clearly are out of this world as well as absurdist details from newspapers that audiences may be surprised to learn are actually true. In other words, Russian Girls suggests that reality is never quite as obvious as we like to think it is.

But what of the reality of the Russians depicted? An interesting development that took place between the play’s initial workshop reading in Paula Vogel’s playwriting class at YSD and its first staging at Alliance was the opportunity to see the play given a studio presentation—in Moscow, in Russian! In 2010, Miroshnik went back to Moscow and the show was translated and, she says, greatly altered for use by a Russian company. Seeing the show in Russian, Miroshnik began doing “edits for speed” and was able to test her vision of Russian girls against real Russian audiences.

And will this staging be different than the one at Alliance? Quite a bit, Miroshnik says: director Rachel Chavkin, two-time OBIE-Award-winner who directed the premiere of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, has “a radically different vision of the play,” and, for starters, the Russian girls are now members of a punk band. Enter Chad Raines, YSD grad, rock-band mainstay (for his own band The Simple Pleasures and, for much of 2012-13, as guitar and synthesizer on world tour with Amanda Palmer) and Critics Circle Award-winning sound design man, to concoct songs for the group and to do that voodoo that he do so well. The Rep’s Russian Girls is bound to rock.

Whether in workshop, at Alliance, in Russian, or in rock, Miroshnik’s play seems to be showing both endurance and a certain useful malleability. While the Rep staging will no doubt be a technical marvel in many ways, the play itself seems adaptable to many kinds of spaces. Miroshnik mentions that her mentor, Paula Vogel, would point at the “third production” of a play as the point at which the playwright relinquishes it and lets it have fully a life of its own. Miroshink laughs pleasantly when I suggest that perhaps in the not-to-distant future her play will be staged by YSD students—the Yale Cab’s new season ends with a play by celebrated YSD playwriting grad Tarell Alvin McCraney. Writing plays strong in roles for women, as Miroshnik does, seems not a bad strategy for revivals.

And what’s next? Miroshnik wouldn’t give too many details about her current projects, except to say that she has been at work on a play that’s more of a character study and less an ensemble piece as both the Girls plays are, and to say that each of her plays requires “a different engine”—such as basketball or fairytales—to drive the action. Like Vogel, Miroshnik is a firm believer in “stretching or exercising a different muscle with each new play.”

In any case, it’s not too much of a stretch to expect that The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls will be a fascinating and entertaining debut of Meg Miroshnik’s work at the Yale Rep.

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls By Meg Miroshnik Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Yale Repertory Theatre January 31-February 22, 2014

Unhappy Hedda

The third Yale School of Drama thesis show opens tonight, directed by Katherine McGerr. Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, is a masterpiece, a character study that is one of theater’s most fascinating roles. As the playbill by the show’s dramaturg, Jennifer Schmidt, suggests, the play, unlike some of Ibsen’s other famous plays, does not take aim at social problems so as to give meaning to the play’s action. In Hedda Gabler, the problem lies with Hedda herself; her manipulation of others and her ultimate fate would seem to set a moral, though audiences are left to determine what that might be. Is she tragic or does she get what she deserves, is she mean-spirited or high-spirited, is she idealistic or nihilistic?

For McGerr, Hedda Gabler is a play that is meant to shock its audience. “There’s nothing old about it, the play is alive today,” McGerr says, and hopes the audience will be “shocked, but understand it and be shocked by what it means.” One question the production faced was how to remove the play from its period setting—the 1890s—without “updating it” to the present. The show’s striking design (Adrian Martinez Frausto), with the audience literally looking through the glass walls of the home of Jørgen and Hedda Tesman, is somewhat modernist, without being of a definite era. Costumes (Soule Golden) as well are modern, with some of the elegance of art deco, while furnishings show a mixture of modern shapes together with the older mode of life that the Tesmans are trying to move up from. The house is one of the finest in the neighborhood and is the place where Jørgen (Daniel Reece) expects to begin his career as a professor with a young wife and possibly a family—particularly if his doting Aunt Julia (Elia Monte-Brown) has her way.

McGerr says that, in working with her cast, the question they have been asking is “who is [Hedda]?” They see both her cruelty and her frailty. McGerr thinks of her heroine as “ahead of her time and smarter than the others around her, but also frustrated.” It’s that frustration that fuels many of her actions, we might say, and Hedda’s complexity has always fascinated audiences. What interests McGerr and her company is the very question of what draws others to Hedda, what makes them love and trust her. We—the audience—might understand the attraction if we admit we love her too. Much may rely upon whether or not we identify with her.

As Hedda, Ashton Heyl is lively and accommodating, with finely chiseled features and blonde hair bound tightly to her head. Her costumes accentuate the graceful lines of her figure and she indeed looks very much the prize catch of the area that Tesman—and others—take her for. “Others” include Commissioner Brack (Mitchell Winter), a close friend of the Tesmans—Jørgen is literally in his debt—who wants to get closer. The sparring flirtation between Brack and Hedda is one of the show’s strengths, allowing us to see how Hedda handles herself when confronted with another’s machinations. Both seem wary of each other’s strengths while looking for an opening that will be useful. Winter’s Brack seems to be a man forever testing the water, just waiting til it gets comfy.

Reece’s Tesman is so absorbed in his hopes for his career and his elation at winning Hedda, he’s unaware of Brack’s overtures to Hedda, and rather welcomes his friend’s attentions to his wife. Tesman is the comic figure in the cast, to a large extent, and perhaps some of our sympathy for Hedda may come from our growing sense of the obtuseness of the man she married. Even so, Reece’s Tesman is likeable and aims to please. We might expect Hedda to wrap him around her finger, but not so. We’re looking at a domestic unit where the man—especially with the moral and even the financial support of his aunt—sets the tone and Hedda is expected to content herself in the home he has gone into considerable debt to buy for her.

The more dire threat to that contentment, for Tesman, is the sudden reappearance in town of the brilliant but dissolute scholar Eilert Lövborg (Mamoudou Athie). Suddenly Tesman again faces professional competition and, what’s more, we learn that Lövborg had some scenes with Hedda when she was single and living with her father. There’s a back-story there and Lövborg’s recent “reclamation” by the sweetly supportive Thea Elvsted (Tiffany Mack), an earlier flame of Tesman’s, sets up a possible game of mixed couples to offset Brack’s desired threesome. Ibsen was nothing if not canny about the possibilities of romantic affairs in small towns—your basic soap opera learned well from his tendency to hint at desires below the surface that may flare into reality at any moment. The cast is rounded out by Ariana Venturi as long-suffering servant Berte—suffering not only because she’s the only servant the Tesmans can afford, but because her long ears pick up some of the dirt on her mistress. This minor role is amplified a bit to give hints of the kind of “upstairs/downstairs” view in which a servant stands in as witness.

As Lövborg, Athie gives us a vivid sense of instability, but also of the kind of passion that threatens at any moment to overrun the pacing of Hedda’s cat-and-mouse game. Athie’s loose cannon in the midst of a world of bland formalities adds an odd force to the play that other characters seem unable to cope with. As Thea, Mack is lovely and very sensible, perhaps too sympathetic. Hedda’s maliciousness toward her can seem motiveless if we like Thea too much.

Hedda, we see, toys with the possibility of romance but doesn’t truly desire it, so that much of her motivation comes from her attitude toward Thea, who, unhappily married in a manner worse than Hedda, has been Lövborg’s salvation, as well as placing her chaste romantic hopes in him. Backing the now ascendant Lövborg, Thea may actually “win,” you see . . . .

Plot-wise, the over-riding interest is in who will get the upper-hand on whom, and with what consequence. Props—such as Hedda’s old piano, her father’s pistols, Lövborg’s new book and, even more, his brilliant unpublished manuscript, dictated to Thea, written with her in weeks of comradely intimacy—serve well as tangible reference points in a world where dialogue can be a duel, a seduction, and almost always the imposition of one will upon another. Paul Walsh’s translation, in shedding some of the Old World gentility, seems at times to lose some of the finer nuances of motivation as well.

Ibsen was a great playwright. Hedda Gabler is one of his greatest plays. McGerr and company have created a deliciously dark modern comedy in which Heyl’s Hedda—steely, desperate, winning, manipulative, and fine—pits her wits against obtuseness. To what end?

Hedda Gabler By Henrik Ibsen, translated by Paul Walsh Directed by Katherine McGerr

Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush; Production Dramaturg: Jennifer Schmidt; Stage Manager: Shannon L. Gaughf

Yale School of Drama University Theater February 1-7, 2014

My Buddy Beethoven

She Talks to Beethoven is one of Adrienne Kennedy’s Suzanne Alexander plays, in this case centering on Alexander in Ghana in 1961, shortly after the country’s independence, as she convalesces from a wound and awaits news of her husband, David, a “revolutionary poet,” professor, and possible renegade from political assassins, who may already have been killed. In a sense, the play pits Alexander’s tension with the tensions of Beethoven’s Fidelio, in which a woman rescues her husband from a political prison. In other words, Kennedy considers the role of art as consolation and inspiration during difficult times. The play also delves into the creative process as Alexander and her husband, who wrote together at times, had quarreled over a play she was writing on Beethoven, as, David felt, Suzanne viewed the great composer in too romantic a fashion. Rather than simply paralleling Alexander’s predicament with the plot of Fidelio, Kennedy puts Alexander in dialogue with Beethoven himself, who is undergoing great stress in his own life while writing Fidelio, due to his health problems, established deafness, difficulties with his nephew to whom he acts as guardian, and the creative struggle of writing his sole opera, to say nothing of the invading French army led by Napoleon. What Kennedy creates, in this dialogue and overlap, is a sense of how immersion in Beethoven’s difficulties helps Alexander to deal with hers, but, because Beethoven is present to her, there is also the sense that Alexander becomes a confidante, almost a collaborator with the composer.

In a recent production at JACK, in Brooklyn, NY, director Charlotte Brathwaite accentuates the play’s verbal textures by doing away with all of the script’s naturalistic elements. The scenic design by Abigail DeVille presents us with twin “corridors” that arch around a central playing space. Audience members are invited to stand inside these structures and view the action through various irregular window spaces. Indeed, the corridors are actually spaces created by latticed walls so that moving through them provides differing views of the action. Meanwhile, the action of the two-actor drama is not restricted to the central space as the actors may at times walk through or behind the corridors, and thus in and out of the audience.

This dynamic conception of the play provides elements of a movement piece—not only are the duo in dialogue, they seem at times to be performing a pas de deux, with shifts in dramatic lighting and projections swirling within the playing space, while music—at times Beethoven’s, at times African instruments, at times electronic—creates a sonic counterpoint to the action. Highly stylized in its presentation, Brathwaite’s She Talks to Beethoven accentuates Kennedy’s play as a text of voices, shifting our attention amongst a past in Vienna, represented by contemporary accounts of Beethoven, a “present” in Ghana, represented by radio reports about David Alexander as a missing person, and a creative fantasy in which Suzanne Alexander (Natalie Paul) interacts with Beethoven (Paul-Robert Pryce) and both act out a verbal and non-verbal representation of their relationship.

As might be expected, a single viewing of this complex presentation leaves one primarily with a range of moments, of powerful impressions—sometimes of action over words, or of lighting over action, or of action viewed from a particularly advantageous observation point. By moving about the moving action, each viewer is given a different access to the play, while subsequent viewings would also afford differing experiences. Moments such as Beethoven rapidly immersing his head into a bucket and removing it, or of his shout to his nephew Karl, who tried to hang himself, while creating a silhouette of a hanging body, or of Suzanne crouched and writing in a notebook or moving away from Beethoven repeatedly to look out a window for her husband’s longed-for approach take on a spell-binding dimension due to the choreography of the presentation. One moment that especially fascinated me with its rhythmic precision was when Paul and Pryce, clasped together side by side and facing in opposite directions, moved together in a tense dance of both togetherness and opposition.

Because Pryce is a tall, angular black man, costumed in no way to resemble Beethoven, my impression from the start was that the “visits” from or to Beethoven were present to Alexander’s mind as her husband playacting, indulging her by taking on the voice of Beethoven during her creative process. At the end of the play, when David returns, she says to him “You sent Beethoven until you returned, didn’t you?” And David replies “I knew he would console you while I was absent.” As scripted, this moment might be taken as a “reveal,” indicating what Brathwaite’s production chooses to dramatize from the start: that David is Beethoven or, rather, that Beethoven is a screen for Alexander’s anxieties about David. While I can see the need for the line in a production that followed faithfully Kennedy’s stage directions, I felt that, here, it arrived as a little too pat, though, for some, it may well have been the “click” of confirmation about what we had been watching.

Kennedy’s play, which is a sort of fantasy-dream play, touching on creative isolation, political oppression, ideological struggle, and both the consolation and difficulty of committed relationships, borrows freely from eye-witness descriptions of Beethoven, mixing them with David reading from the revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon, as well as poems the Alexanders read on the air. Because Beethoven, grown quite deaf, required his interlocutors to write in “conversation books” so that he could respond to them, there is also a good deal of writing going on in the play. We might say that She Talks with Beethoven is also about Kennedy writing the play.

Brathwaite, a director who trusts physical theater to speak for itself, creates a discourse of movement that, in a sense, accompanies Kennedy’s text like an additional score, while her actors—using ingenious hand-held lighting devices/microphones—create verbal and visual textures of nuance and subtlety. Together with DeVille’s unusual installation-like playing space, with lighting by Yi Zhao, projections by Hannah Wasileski and sound design by Guillermo E. Brown, Brathwaite’s vision of She Talks with Beethoven takes on the dimensions of a long, meditative reverie. A narrative of risk, anxiety, rapport and ultimate triumph, the play doesn’t de-romanticize Beethoven, as David Alexander may have hoped, rather it portrays heroic fellow-feeling between artists in extremity, not to “console,” as David says, but to inspire. As does this intricate and imaginative production.

She Talks to Beethoven By Adrienne Kennedy Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite

Scenic Design: Abigail DeVille; Lighting Design: Yi Zhao; Production Design: Hannah Wasileski; Composer/Sound Design: Guillermo E. Brown; Costumes: Dede M. Ayite; Dramaturg: Kate Attwell; Stage Management: Julie Ann Arbiter, Gabriel DeLeon

JACK 505 1/2 Waverly Ave Brooklyn, NY

January 15-25, 2014

Classroom Self-Defense

The latest Yale Cabaret offering, The Defendant, addresses the quality of life of the underprivileged—in this case, students our educational system is failing. The play, by third-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown, is based on the playwright’s experiences as a teacher in the New York school system, a background that injects a realism into the play, even as the play moves a bit tendentiously from Welcome Back, Kotter-style classroom hi-jinx to something much more dramatic. The play begins with charges against “the defendant”—Idea (Chalia La Tour)—that almost drop into the background, but for dark reminders along the way that set-up the devastating finale. The cast, consisting of first year YSD students making their Cabaret debuts, fully enters into their roles of spirited youths trapped in a low expectation school, facing yet another substitute teacher. Serena (Melanie Field) is a bit out of her element in trying to fill in for a recently departed biology teacher—Mrs. Brown—who called one student a sociopath and then fled. But Serena has her heart in the right place and is struggling to do right by her charmingly dysfunctional charges.

Idea is the most promising student, a dynamo of personality who strives to over-achieve. As her boyfriend Ruben (Julian Elijah Martinez) reminds us, over-achieving is easy in a school that asks for little more than busy work, and yet Serena still hopes to affect the students’ futures. Her tirade when Idea is arrested for a provoked assault that ends in the death of Dean Knowls grips us with the anger that Monte-Brown infuses into the speech. Serena’s boyfriend, a lawyer (Aubie Merrylees), injects a sense of legal practicality into the scene, which lets the question of violence and retribution hang unresolved. We eventually see the scene in which the predatory Dean (Merrylees), demanding the favors Idea once gave, meets with death; her act of violence is set-up by several stories in which Idea, the victim of domestic rape early in her life, flips out to the shock of her peers.

Idea’s justification is clear enough, and the enormity of her act is tragic. This is what overwhelms Serena and Ruben, and plunges the other students into despondency. The situation is almost too much for the play to bear, as most of the time it is a comical exploration of classroom types. As directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the play is very indulgent toward its actors: several are given brief monologues to introduce themselves and provide commentary on the other characters, creating moments of confidence with the audience that do much to make the characters likeable—particularly Jonathan Majors as Kyle, and Shaunette Renée Wilson as Idea’s BFF Diandra, and, very memorably, as Grandma Rose.

More context for the lives of the students would be welcome, as, collectively, they seem to be school-bound personalities even willing to come to class on a Saturday. Teaching biology quickly goes out the window, and Serena has them enacting plays, at some length, and parsing poems, but it’s the lessons that take place between the students that are more interesting—such as the sweetly teen-aged coupling of Idea and Ruben—and Monte-Brown’s ear for the street lingo of her characters provides both amusement and the kinds of wise asides that keep these kids interesting.

Seth Bodie’s set—created wholly of schoolroom chairs—is both sculptural and imposing, effectively lit by Joey Moro to give the whole a sense of a claustrophobic maze these students might never escape from, unless, as with Idea, it is into even more dire incarceration. Fast-moving and played with feeling, The Defendant works hard in a brief compass to amuse, inform and anger its audience, and mostly succeeds.

The Defendant By Elia Monte-Brown Directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer; Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Producer: Jabari Brisport; Set: Seth Bodie; Costumes: Montana Blanco; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Lights: Joey Moro; Technical Director: Matt Groeneveld

Yale Cabaret January 23-25, 2014

On the Job

Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant is a thoughtful comedy, a consideration of the kinds of relationships that form in the workplace. In a world where “job security” is a great desiderata, one would expect that meaningful relationships at work would also be desired. Such seems to be not always the case, and that leaves room for a play like Schreck’s, a way of investigating the interplay of personality and opportunity on the job. That’s not to say that The Consultant is a job-based play, as in an exposé of a certain profession. The main players at Sutton, Feingold, and McGrath—such as the boss Harold—are never portrayed. We’re viewing the middle management level but we spend most of our time in the reception area where Tania (Cassie Beck), an NYU grad with a Comp Lit degree, mans the ship, sorta. Tania’s not very good at her job and from that follows much of what happens here. One of the subtle aspects of the play is that it shows us people who, in being themselves, aren’t quite what their job descriptions require. This isn’t a play about the dehumanization that takes place in the workplace but rather about the human situations that fleetingly come and go while the world of work churns on. Sometimes, indeed, work seems to be an inconvenience even while on the job.

SFM is a pharmaceutical ad agency. A business that we might imagine to be fairly flush, as such things go, but even such a major contributor to our collective well-being is feeling the pinch in the “global downturn” of 2009, which is to say that no one we meet feels quite so secure as they might otherwise. In particular, Jun Suk (Nelson Lee), who has taken on the clients of the recently departed Barbara (Lynne McCullough), is having problems. He’s a capable designer but not a capable presenter of his ideas. Enter Amelia (Clare Barron), hired to be “the consultant” who will help him get his act together. Amelia, a student at NYU, is more or less moonlighting here, as her real expertise is ESL tutoring. No matter, Jun Suk is desperate for a helping hand and, while not enthusiastic about her or her coaching, lets it continue, largely because of the earnest efforts of Mark (Darren Goldstein), a manager, to get him some help. Jun Suk doesn’t suffer fools gladly and that’s the sort of thing that can sour your audience in a corporate presentation.

As Amelia, Clare Barron is perfect. She has a girlish earnestness that flirts with cluelessness but comes off as authenticity. Amelia’s not really faking anything and that in itself seems a breath of fresh air in this environment. Barron has a knack for non-reaction reactions that does a lot for her role as witness more than catalyst—though in one key scene she unwittingly helps to bring down the “friends” she has tried to make here, particularly Tania and Mark. Such unwittingness is what keeps this play interesting. Rather than watching for “agendas,” we’re watching how people undermine themselves and others even when trying to be helpful.

As Jun Suk, Nelson Lee has the role with the most leverage, so to speak. Do we warm to him or not? He’s a prickly guy and yet, because he seems the most put-upon, we tend to hope he’ll be ok. This isn’t the kind of play where romance bells are going to sound for Jun Suk and his consultant, so the suspense is in whether or not Amelia’s work with him pays off. Romance might be happening between Tania and Mark, but on the other hand, it could just be a shack-up with consequences, or not.

Schreck’s dialogue has an ear for natural wit, the kind of comebacks that occur normally. It’s not sit-com humor and, as directed by Kip Fagan, everyone is sorta likeable, but also at times questionable. It’s a lot like life in that way. When Amelia, filling in for Tania, meets the formidable Barbara, we get a whiff of life outside the ad agency—Barbara seems to have become some kind of self-help guru and Amelia might be a likely candidate for her teachings. The situations in The Consultant suggest a world where no one is happy with their jobs and everyone is worried about keeping them anyway. Schreck wants to suggest the possibilities that come when things crash.

From that point of view, the play ends on a positive note, as the last scene takes place outside SFM with perhaps the beginnings of a bond between Amelia and Tania, to convey the “family” of co-workers. But the scene that struck me most between the two was when Tania—stressed out at losing her job and losing Mark’s attentions—gives Amelia, who is feeling newly empowered à la Barbara, the cold-shoulder, though Amelia clearly wants to be friends. It’s a moment where all the good will in the world doesn’t work if someone—in this case Tania—won’t let you in. True, that’s part of family and friendships too, not just workplace bonhomie, but it spoke volumes about the difficulty of relationships that take place only “on stage”—on the job.

As a staged space, Andrew Boyce’s set design and Matt Frey’s lighting are very realistic, so much so that when Amelia and Jun Suk go into the conference room we overhear them through miked pick-ups. This has the effect of putting distance between the common space of the reception area and the inner sanctum of the conference room, which made the interactions in the latter seem more forced—it was easy to understand why no one would want to stay in there. Outside, in Tania’s space, is where all the meaningful slippages occur, including the after effects of hard partying by Mark and Jun Suk.

The Consultant has the feel of “a couple months in the life”—just time enough to see everyone’s fortunes change without being able to say for certain “what next.” We begin and end in medias res. Will our jobs still be here tomorrow? Will our relationships? Will we? Heidi Schreck’s play asks us to think about the implications of those questions and the answers that matter.

The Consultant By Heidi Schreck Directed by Kip Fagen

Set Design: Andrew Boyce; Costume Design: Jessica Pabst; Lighting Design: Matt Frey; Composer & Sound Design: Daniel Kluger; Production Stage Manager: Sunneva Stapleton; Casting: Calleri Casting

The Long Wharf Theatre January 8-February 9, 2014

Whence is That Knocking?

The Yale Cabaret is back. It opened this weekend with the U.S. premiere of Have I None, a taut, difficult, and entertaining play by Britain’s Edward Bond, directed by Jessica Holt. With a cast of three in a shabby, barely furnished room, the play manages, through dialogue and interactions alone, to create a sense of claustrophobia, dystopia, and lots of other phobias. It’s a play about a grim future in which the government has stepped in to save people from themselves—which translates into our society of luxury being replaced with a society of austerity and “resettlement.” To attain this state of ultimate parsimony, apparently, one of the luxuries dispensed with is the luxury of having a past. Photographs and pictures are not allowed, that much we gather from the dialogue. That’s not to say that the backstory ever becomes completely clear; this isn’t a sci-fi tale of future shock and how the world got that way—Bond seems only interested in giving us the bare bones of this bare-bones world. What he does explore is the effect on humans of whatever status quo they find themselves coping with.

It’s 2077 and a couple, Jams (Aaron Bartz) and Sara (Ceci Fernandez), live, under considerable tension, in their government-issued rooms, with their government-issued table and two chairs (“authority discourages furniture,” it’s said). Jams works on a patrol that goes about “the ruins” to make sure all is as it should be; he witnesses things like an old woman struggling to hang up a picture—strictly forbidden—and, in Reading, a mass “suicide outbreak” during which the residents all walked through the streets holding knives at arms' length before them, until they began to stab and cut themselves mercilessly. Sara, who we meet first, is plagued by sporadic knocking at the door, and no one there when she opens it.

Into this spare domestic space comes Grit (Chris Bannow) who claims he is Sara’s brother. He has walked “months” from the “other side” where there was a suicide outbreak—people throwing themselves off buildings and bridges. He carries a picture he claims shows Sara (whom he calls Sally) and himself when they were children. She denies knowing him. And of course photos are forbidden, so Grit is not only a potential reminder of a past best forgotten, he is also, in traveling with a photo and without a travel document, a sort of renegade. But his most immediate disruption to the life of Jams and Sara is that he sits, severally, in each of their chairs.

The comedy of the play is in the minutia of these domestic tussles over space and possession. Sara says she keeps a diary (though one imagines that too would be forbidden) to note events such as the time she heard her chair scrape—proof that Jams had been sitting in it and got out of it when she came in. Other infractions include the time Sara left the tap running and the time she left her shoes where Jams might trip on them and break his neck. With these exchanges—engagingly vehement and both shocking and absurd—Bond shows us the quality of life under such austerity. If it echoes of life during wartime—with rations and the threat of the Blitz—that’s no doubt because Bond was a child in WWII and the horrors of the future he imagines recall the horrors of a past when death came knocking regularly, in the midst of life as usual.

Holt’s production maintains a firm grip on the play’s tension, and her cast is quite adept at the kind of humor, dark and very British, on view here. It’s a fine line. Bannow’s Grit, for instance, is someone whose life has come apart but who somehow manages to be a forthright fellow. What his aim is, in trying to claim kin, is never stated outright—to Jams he’s a “sick ghost with a disease”—but his presence there occasions a hallucinated scene with Sara, gowned in a cape of spoons that becomes a cape of bones, who tells him she remembers when he had fever as a child and, to her mind, died, though their parents and the doctor were unaware of this. This scene, with Sara crouching beside the sleeping Grit, presents the only tenderness on view in the play—that is until Grit helps the dying Sara to leave the house after she deliberately consumes poisoned soup meant for him.

The strength of the play is in its pacing, letting things settle upon us during lulls, broken-up at any time by shouting fits. In the histrionics we might occasionally lose a key line—Bond’s dialogue is very precise and, though the cast very gamely creates suitable British accents, at times the tonality is a bit off. This seemed to me particularly the case for Jams. Aaron Bartz does an amazing job in a part that provides the forward thrust of almost every scene, full of the verbal energy of a man who will talk aloud to himself and to anyone in earshot, but his Jams seems to me too sensitive. I believe Bond intends a character much more in-keeping with the stereotypical “bobby” or British Constable, so that much of the comic intent depends on this figure’s fetish for control and fear of getting “chopped” for infractions against the code of conduct—he even uses the phase “conduct unbecoming” when refusing to help his dying wife leave the house.

Fernandez gives much dignity and pathos to the role of Sara, her very expressive eyes and hands creating a sense of a woman capable of living a much different sort of life, and her wandering in the ruins attests that her dissatisfaction goes beyond use of her chair behind her back; we should see that Sara’s fierce defense of her rights in the house comes from years under the same roof with Jams—regardless, almost, of what’s going on “out there.” Grit, in bringing with him a phantom past and creating an occasion for poisoning, gives Sara her out, which may be the start of another “outbreak” as Jams looks out the door after her departure and moans “O God it’s worse than Reading.”

A final note, about that title: the playbill quotes a line from Acts 3:6, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give thee,” but I find another relevant reference in the old riddle that begins “Brothers and sisters have I none…”

Have I None By Edward Bond Directed by Jessica Holt

Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Producer: Molly Hennighausen; Set: Alexander Woodward; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound: Joel Abbott; Lights: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Technical Director: Justin Bennett

Yale Cabaret January 16-18, 2013

Theater News

This week the Long Wharf’s world premiere of Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant opens officially on Wednesday, January 15. See our preview here. This week as well the Yale Cabaret resumes its 46th season with Have I None, a daunting play by British playwright Edward Bond from 2000. Set in 2077, the play darkly imagines a dystopia in which memory, and therefore history, has been erased. Jessica Holt, 2nd-year YSD director and Artistic Director for the Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014, will stage the claustrophobic play with stress on Bond's sense of the absurd. January 16-18.

Next week, on January 23, from 5:30 to 8:30, celebrated local theater troupe A Broken Umbrella Theatre will host a fundraiser at the Eli Whitney Museum and unveil details about their latest venture. As usual, the project is an original play based on historical figures, facts, and locales of New Haven. If You Build It, the new play, focuses on inventor A. C. Gilbert to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his most famous creation: the Erector Set. Director Ruben Ortiz, playwright Charlie Alexander, and cast members will present an excerpt of the work in progress.

The build up of the production will be complemented by an evening of treats and toys: Small Kitchen Big Taste will be serving “architectural food,” including slider and mashed potato stations to build-your-own-cupcakes, Thimble Island Brewery will feature locally crafted beers, and ABU's Chrissy Gardner and the Moody Food Trio will provide musical accompaniment. Guests are invited to try their hand at the engineering feat of Erector Set construction along with ABU’s crew of welders, carpenters and electricians.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre has presented site specific works in New Haven for the last five years and enjoyed perhaps their greatest triumph at last year’s Arts and Ideas Festival with Freewheelers. Come out, sneak a peak at their next production, become a patron, and have fun.

For more information, please visit www.abrokenumbrella.org, or contact Rachel Alderman at: 203.823.7988 or rachel@abrokenumbrella.org

Next week as well will see the 10th show of the season at the Yale Cabaret: 3rd-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown’s original play, The Defendant, about the rigors of public school in New York (where Monte-Brown taught); the play aims to recreate some of the anxieties of today’s student, and to question the values of public education in America, using all 1st year actors in the YSD program. January 23-25.

And on the last week of the month, January 31st, previews begin for the Yale Repertory Theatre’s next production: The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, a world premiere from Whiting-Award winning playwright, and recent YSD graduate, Meg Miroshnik. Miroshnik's play, directed by two-time OBIE-Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin, who previously directed an Off-Broadway production of the celebrated musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, is set in 2005 as a twenty-year-old girl named Annie returns to her native Russia. Underneath the glamor of a Post-Soviet Moscow bedecked with high ticket consumer goods, Annie discovers a land of enchantment straight out of a fairytale, with evil stepmothers, wicked witches, and ravenous bears.

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls opens officially on February 7, and runs til February 22.

Right Author, Wrong Book

Doris Lessing died last year. It got me thinking again about another one of my ongoing small problems as a reader, which I can explain very nicely with two writers as examples. The problem is: You love a writer, but for the wrong book. Another way to put it: The weird situation where you love a writer, but exclusively for the "lesser" works. When a writer gets famous, or develops a reputation for being particularly good at some thing or other, you’re supposed to gush over That Thing. Let me take as examples Doris Lessing (famous for her novel The Golden Notebook, embraced by feminists around the world; her political novel The Good Terrorist, and her sci-fi/fantasy novels) and Shirley Jackson, about whom I’ve written elsewhere for the New Haven Review. Shirley Jackson is known today mostly for her creepy fiction, novels such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman, among many others.

Here is my problem: I have spent most of my life really admiring both of these writers, and regarding them with awe and wonder, and counting myself, really, truly, as an ardent fan, without having read any of these landmark titles.

Instead, I base my adoration of these writers on books that I think most critics would view as fluffy side projects. In the case of Doris Lessing, my love is based entirely -- entirely -- on a really skinny, scary-as-hell novel called The Fifth Child, which came out in 1988. (It’s actually a very Shirley Jacksonesque work, about a happy family that has four children, and then a fifth baby arrives, and Everything Changes and Not For the Better.) In the case of Shirley Jackson, my love is based on Life Among the Savages, which is just a collection of fictionalized essays about domestic life. (The connections here are fun to think about, aren’t they?)

And I have no plans to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or Hangsaman, or whatever else.

Now, in the case of Doris Lessing, I’ve long felt bad that this book, The Fifth Child, was the one that made such a big impression on me. I suppose it was bound to; I was never someone who liked small children, and always found them scary. The idea of ever being a mother was completely abhorrent to me: Never! Never! (Never mind that I am, in fact, a mother now.) It was a short novel (my favorite kind) that was taut and made me feel that my sense about children was not unfounded. And it was, you know, well-written, had a literary pedigree, was published by a fancy house, etc. etc. I think I read that book once a year for ages. I remember that it was one of the books I took with me when I went away to college. I wasn’t at all ashamed of my love for The Fifth Child, but I definitely felt guilty that none of Lessing’s other books held any interest for me. I thought it didn’t speak well of me that The Fifth Child was the Lessing book I knew and loved so well, and more to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. (I acknowledge this, though: Perhaps I just wasn’t the right age for most of her books. There are definitely some writers where if you don’t read them at just the right phase of your life, there’s no point. My mother gave me copies of numerous Lessing books when I was a teenager, which I glanced at and then set aside, because I thought, “oh, who cares.” At the same time, though, I’ve never gotten rid of them. Maybe the time is now, and in 2014 I should put them on my list. I’ve actually begun to read Anna Karenina, recently, for the first time; this, if nothing else, proves that anything is possible, because I’ve been avoiding reading that for decades, now, in spite of the fact that I own two copies of it.)

I thought that The Fifth Child as the only Lessing book I knew and loved so well showed me to be a weak reader, somehow. More to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. And then a couple days ago I finally got around to reading the issue of the New York Times Magazine that they do every December, the Lives They Lived issue, where writers and photographers do little pieces about the noteworthy and interesting people who died during the year. Of all people, of all books, Steve Almond wrote about Doris Lessing, and god bless him for making me see so clearly that I am not alone. His essay, which is a pleasure to read by the way, begins with this:

“My interest in Doris Lessing -- Nobel Prize winner and one of the most celebrated writers on earth -- derives from a single book, the 1988 novel The Fifth Child, which has haunted me for more than 20 years.”

I always knew I liked that Steve Almond. I don’t care about his fiction at all, by the way, but boy do I love that book Candy Freak.

Consulting Heidi Schreck

The new year has begun, and snow and cold have come to New Haven. But have no fear: The theater season resumes this week with the world premiere of The Consultant at the Long Wharf Theatre, the third full-length play by Heidi Schreck. Long Wharf patrons who saw the production of The Old Masters in 2011 may remember Heidi Schreck as Nicky Mariano. Schreck, an Obie Award-winning actress, has divided her time between acting and playwrighting since her days acting in her own plays at the Seattle Theatre Company. That’s where she got to know Gordon Edelstein and his welcome support of her projects, so that coming to the Long Wharf with a new play is much “like coming home”; The Consultant is directed by Schreck’s husband and former colleague at the Seattle Theatre Company, Kip Fagan.

Outside of theater, Schreck has held a number of positions that have played into her work. A stint as a journalist in Russia fueled her play There Are No More Secrets, and, after moving to New York with Fagen in 2003, a job as an ESL teacher and a coach for persons making business presentations became the basis for The Consultant. In the play, Amelia finds herself with the task of helping Jun Suk, a talented but insecure designer, present his designs at a New York pharmaceuticals company. She learns he has reasons for his insecurity as no one at Sutton, Feingold, and McGrath is quite sanguine about their future. Though Schreck’s experience in the corporate world predates a bit the attrition of the Great Recession, the sense of paranoia and pressure in her play certainly resonates with our times of high unemployment and jobs that are apt to disappear at a moment’s notice.

To Schreck, Amelia “is a lot like I was,” a bit detached from the corporate world, encountering people like Tania, an office assistant “over-educated for her job,” who seems to use the job simply to make ends meet, rather than pursuing a career. As a consultant, Schreck found that a lot of people “just want to talk, and are looking for a good listener” as a way to reflect on what’s happening with them. Amelia doesn’t play therapist, but is rather “our entry into this workplace,” as we begin to grasp its dynamic, perhaps with more clarity than she does. Amelia is only “looking for an opportunity to use her skills,” but, as Schreck sees it, “disaster”—like losing a job—“can sometimes be the opening to other opportunities.”

Watching the talented cast at the Long Wharf—Schreck says everyone is “exactly right” for their parts—Schreck has come to see a struggle in the play: “who’s play is it?” There are back stories to the male parts—Jun Suk (Nelson Lee) and Mark (Darren Goldstein)—that only come out bit by bit, and a certain recklessness in the air at times, particularly for Tania (Cassie Beck). Jun Suk is going through an awful time that has nothing to do with his job, but which has impact on his performance at work. Each character’s situation changes in the course of the play, and perhaps it’s Tania who changes the most, leading us to see that Amelia (Clare Barron) may be more witness than catalyst.

Rather than look to the kind of popular office comedies that have been on TV for decades—particulary the kinds of satire found in The Office—Schreck looks to the work of María Irene Fornés, finding inspiration in her off-beat, avant-garde productions that showcase the challenges women face in male environments. Schreck says she’s not interested in the absurdity of the workplace but rather in “the strange and surprising forms of tenderness” that can arise between workers facing similar challenges. No one is really at home in the work environment of The Consultant and all are coping in different ways. Part of the challenge of coping has to do with the possibilities of “self-invention and of finding one’s true values.”

The Consultant gets much of its comedy from the loose ends and unfinished business we sense in Schreck's characters. They are people not yet completely formed, not quite willing to be only what their jobs make of them, but also not really focused on what else to do with themselves. From her first play, Creature, about the medieval memoirist Margery Kempe’s decision to become “a saint” by living a spiritual life despite her bourgeois background, to her next play about work in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, Schreck continues to explore the question of faith, including “faith in other people.” She sees all her plays as asking questions about “figuring out how to live”—both at the level of how to get by, when one’s interests might be more spiritual or creative than most day jobs expect workers to be, and at the level of how best to live up to one’s potential and to do what is best for all in the kinds of imperiled environments we all cope with.

The Consultant premieres on Wednesday, January 8, with an official opening the following Wednesday, January 15, and runs til February 9.

Long Wharf Theatre 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven

203.787.4282 or longwharf.org

Straight On Til Mourning

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills’ thesis production of J. M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan is everything a thesis show should be: a unique vision of a well-known work that revisits familiar (and not so familiar) terrain with a new perspective. Wills’ adaptation places Pan in an orphange during World War I, an alteration that creates an entirely different play. It’s also an exemplary thesis show in presenting resources of ensemble acting that set a new standard for the School, which does rather strive to get as many of its acting students involved in any project as possible. In Wills’ Pan, the actors play multiple roles but, in essence, each play one role: a child/orphan, enacting various parts in a child’s version of Peter Pan, and that entails marshaling all props themselves and creating before our wondering eyes all the necessary spaces and events of Peter’s adventures, from the house of the Darlings to a pirate ship, from a rock in the sea at rising tide to a battle with bayonets affixed—and, in Joey Moro’s ingenious design, lighting themselves, as well as seeming to construct Grier Coleman’s costumes ex tempore. The cast is so tremendously busy we have scarcely time to catch our breath, never mind how they do. And, with such a large cast—13—and so many events, it comes as a surprise how fast these two hours with no intermission pass. If you’ve attended many thesis shows then you know that what comes hardest is pacing. This Peter Pan must be pursued by the clock-containing crocodile, so well does it make use of its time.

Wills and his scenic designer, Mariana Sanchez Hernandez, present us with a set that is a testament to war-time austerity and dilapidation, with peeling, no doubt asbestos-ridden paint, hot water pipes overhead, opaque window panes, and uniform cots. The kids in the orphanage are in hopes of adoption and so their story of how a young girl comes to play mother for a host of Lost Boys in Neverland is at once a fantasy projection and a compensation. This innovation adds greatly to characters who, in the play, are simply take-offs on boyhood types, as these actors might, at any time, break character when something in the play strikes too close to home.

I don’t doubt that any parental types in the audience will arrive at a favorite they would gladly adopt—Tootles (Chris Bannow) is the most endearing, but there’s also the know-it-all, Curly (Aaron Luis Profumo), the preening Slightly (Aaron Bartz), the winsome Nibs (Maura Hooper), and the Twins (Hugh Farrell with a hand mirror and an authentic expression of dazed excitement); all also play Indians and/or pirates as required; then there are those who stay pretty much in one or two characters: Prema Cruz’s petulant Tinkerbell and regal Tiger Lily; Michelle McGregor’s blustering Smee and doting Mrs. Darling; Matthew McCollum’s thoughtful John; Mariko Nakasone’s feisty Michael, the baby of the family, and Sophie von Haselberg’s Wendy, a girl almost too mature for make-believe who playacts Mother in hopes of winning Peter’s heart.

Any might at any time step to the footlights and stammer something heartfelt; at one point, after hearing Wendy sing about what her ideal house would be like, all the kids rush to the edge of the stage to fling at us their individual visions of the home of their dreams. Such breaks in the orphans’ make-believe register a reality all are usually at pains to mask.

Their show begins with willful play-acting when “Mrs. Darling,” observes “her children” Wendy and John play-acting as their parents; soon enough the “real” Mr. Darling (Tom Pecinka) shows up and scolds everyone, especially the dog, Nana (Christopher Geary) who is banished from the nursery, thus setting up Peter’s arrival. What this production loses in whimsical magic—no “actual” elfin child floating into the room with fairy dust—it gains in the kinds of magical conjurations that children find in their collective imaginings—sheets as the sea, lifted beds indicating flight, characters pulled about on wagons and wheeled ladders. And forget the fey, androgynous Peters common to productions with a woman in the role; Mickey Theis’ Peter is robust and boyish, and when he takes on Hook (Pecinka) late in the play it feels like a boxing match as well as a duel to the death.

This is a very physical production, with tons of moving parts—some favorite moments are Wendy floating off the rock on a kite, the rock itself a mountain of valises; the props grabbed together to make the crocodile; Tootles’ stray shot with a real gun; the picture-book rescue of Peter from the rock by way of the Neverbird (Christopher Geary, looking like a downed airman—he is also relentlessly amusing as the pirate Starkey); everything said by Pecinka’s Hook, generally in a state of high dudgeon, letting envy of Peter’s fecklessness become, at last, thwarted love; near the end, Hook, in a fit of pique, threatens Peter with a “holocaust of children”—a potent phrase that seems to bring on a grim series of events that all the make-believe in the world can’t prevent. The final moments of the production flip into the nightmarish as children who don’t want to grow up become children who don’t get to.

Inventive, lively, and surprisingly serious, this Peter Pan lets us feel not only a very real cry for the cozy world of a mother’s care but makes us feel the threats to childhood that we should care about: the final images, set in the time of the Great War, can easily be transported to the time of the Blitz or to the sites of our contemporary drone strikes. Wills and company reach out from an orphans’ nursery—filled with children already missing important aspects of family and identity—to grab us with a sense of the atrocity that is the loss of innocence, and the loss of innocent lives.

This Peter Pan is not for children.

Peter Pan By J.M. Barrie Adapted and directed by Dustin Wills

Composer: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri

Yale School of Drama December 13-19, 2013

A Simple Twist of Faith

Watching Ian Cohen’s He Who Laughs, the inaugural production of JCC Theaterworks, directed by Reuven Russell at Yale’s Off-Broadway Theater, I found myself asking the question: can every myth be modernized? What are the costs and benefits of taking a Bible story and putting it in the present day? The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the world’s great mythic tales. Called upon by God, whom he trusts, Abraham is told to sacrifice “the son he loves,” Isaac, as a burnt offering—the way one would offer a fatted calf or a lamb. A true test of faith for a patriarch, the story also bears great significance for the relation between generations—usually understood as “fathers to sons,” particularly when it was sons who fought in wars and thus were “sacrificed” for the common good. Times have changed and such changes might lead us to ask questions about such great foundational stories: are they gender specific or gender neutral? What is the role of women in such a story? As the basis for the true lineage of faith in Judaism, the story carries major connotations about the relation of the faithful to God, even about the very conception of God’s “character.”

Moved to the present day, of course, such a story immediately invites other considerations: a father who might kill his son because a voice only he hears commands it would be seen as delusional, possibly psychotic, and perhaps a religious fanatic to boot. And how would a teen of today react to his father’s mission? Would he make jokes, whine, fight, run?

The best thing about He Who Laughs is the interplay between father and son. Cohen manages—against, perhaps, our own working assumptions—to make the situation feel both contemporary, mythic, and fraught with the big questions that the story, in no matter what setting, invites. The title refers to the tradition that Isaac—Zach in the play—laughed at birth. Zach (Gore Abrams) is a fairly representative teen—a nerd who loves video games, Star Wars, making bad jokes, and is uncertain about girls. He also trusts his father, Al (Chuck Montgomery), and believes that when his father suddenly “got religion” it was for real. God speaks to Al and Zach is hoping to hear the call as well someday. As Al, Montgomery looks patriarchal and easily manifests the kind of seriousness of purpose that makes us want to trust him too.

The key dramatic situation—the father and son car ride to Ramapo in New Jersey to commit the deed—occupies most of Act One. The upshot—after all the possible interpretations of the command (none of which include “dad, you’re nuts”) are discussed—is that Zach sees it from the perspective of true faith. He’s willing to be sacrificed because that’s what God wants. This is achieved without homilies but rather through the give-and-take of dialogue.

The main dramatic situation of Act Two is the father and son happening upon a young runaway girl who has been beaten up and left upon the road by an irate pickup. This “Girl With the Backpack” (Kate Kenney) becomes a possible catalyst. Left alone with her while Al goes to the necessaries with his meds, Zach gets a glimpse of a free spirit’s life on the road. “Girl,” played with forthright charm, is crude, from Zach’s point of view, but she finds him cute and sweet and quickly tries to talk him out of death at his dad’s hands in favor of seeking fortune. The fact that the girl also hears voices lets us wonder whether she could be some version of that lamb trapped amidst the brambles that lets Isaac off the hook in the Bible story.

In the end, Cohen’s play dramatizes a key aspect left out of the story as I learned it. What if Isaac was ready to go and meet God? Wouldn’t being “spared” be something of a bummer? Attainment of supreme exaltation versus . . . . inheriting your dad’s trucking business in New York? Put like that, it might seem a facetious point, and it’s to Abram’s credit that he lets us feel Zach’s disappointment and skepticism about his father’s excuse for not going through with it. The play takes us from a shared acceptance of one will to a dispersal of such faith. The questioning of God, surprisingly, is not when one is going under the ax, but when, rather, the burden is lifted. Al is accused of “bad faith,” in a sense, and that’s sobering to all.

Cohen adds to his central drama an ill-advised role for Sheila—Al’s wife and Zach’s mother, played by Janie Tamarkin. From an intro scene in which one of Al’s co-workers, Sam (Matt Walker), tells her about Al’s extreme behavior, we move to another journey by car to try to stop Al from doing what Sheila suddenly realizes is Al’s goal (a car ride lacking any of the dramatic interest of the father/son ride and any of the useful temptations of the Girl With the Backpack). Sheila at some point runs off in desperation, convinced that Sam is Satan, which leads to a final intervention of sorts that I suppose is meant to give a little comic uplift but which seems tacked on—unless one feels that the story of Abraham and Isaac always needed to be a bit more heymisch with a heavenly bubbe figure.

The sets are spare—wooden outlines of a house and a car—but sufficient, though the car-door sound effects could be louder. Music is used well too to create atmosphere when needed.

An interesting and at times challenging debut of JCC Theaterworks, this workshop production of He Who Laughs provides, as intended, food for thought. Next up is The Last Seder by Jennifer Meisel, March 6-10, with auditions scheduled for January 5th and 6th at the JCC, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge; for more info: dedek@jccnh.org.

He Who Laughs By Ian Cohen Directed by Reuven Russell Workshop production

Stage Manager: Julius L. Stone, Jr.; Dramaturg: Yoni Oppenheim; Lighting Designer: Justin Bennett; Set Consultant: Brian Dudkiewicz; Technical Designer: Kate Newman; Sound Board Operator: Zachary Grabko

December 14-16, 2013 Off-Broadway Theater at Yale

In Search of Peter Pan

The second Yale School of Drama thesis show goes up tomorrow night, Friday the 13th. Third-year director Dustin Wills, recently honored by a Princess Grace Award for his final year of study at YSD, presents his adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Wills, who was co-Artistic Director for the highly successful Yale Summer Cabaret of 2013, says he sought out “dark children’s stories” after realizing his plan to adapt Pinocchio was unworkable. Peter Pan, dark? Wills went to the Beinecke where he found all the various drafts of J.M. Barrie’s work on the play, which the author rewrote yearly throughout much of his life—beyond the initial stage play of 1904, An Afterthought, four years later, and the prose work, Peter and Wendy, based upon it, published in 1911. Wills, who has seen several productions, was drawn to the story, he thinks, by his former work in his home state of Texas, devising theater for underserved audiences, such as juvenile detention centers. The theme of “the Lost Boys”—the children “who fall out of prams” and are lost, until they turn up in Neverland—appealed to Wills, finding in the play a tribute to the imagination of children.

“No matter how dire things may be, nothing stops the imagination,” he said, and the story of how children might clutch onto imaginary worlds, and to youth, certainly has resonance. In his past work with children, Wills was struck by “the cleanliness of their imaginations vs. the messiness of their emotions.” The key, then, is to find a vehicle that shows the tensions within children’s imaginative compensations. Though the play is contemporary with Freud, Wills sees the text as pre-Freudian, even as he has decided to move the setting forward in time. Wills sets his production in 1917, and intends the war-time setting to inspire much of the children’s anxiety.

This Peter Pan is less about spectacle—no one flies, a decision not an imposed limitation—and more about themes of loss, abandonment, and the community that sustains the children in Neverland. With a cast of thirteen, the show is large, and features what Wills calls “ruin porn” in its set—the picturesque qualities of the dilapidated and partially destroyed, showing the grim realities the children have to work with. In Wills’ conception, the children—orphans all—are putting on the show in an effort to find homes among would-be adopting families. Thus one can expect that the elements of showmanship—as Wills’ actors play children acting—will underscore the tenuous relation between the children’s imagination and the audience’s willful suspension of disbelief.

The first thing, then, is that we believe in the children as children. Wills said he has coached his actors to be themselves as children—or early teens at most—as much as possible. The cast, Wills said, became very close very quickly, and “everybody worked really well together from the start,” which has permitted the show to do a full tech run-through well ahead of schedule. And that’s even with a few setbacks, such as Wills himself being sick when the rehearsals began, and losing the actor originally cast as Hook due to an injury during a classroom workshop.

The prospect of actors behaving as younger versions of themselves who then take on the roles in the “Peter Pan” show the orphanage is putting on—including the Darling home as well as Neverland—permits the kind of interesting double-vision found in play-within-a-play situations. The text of Wills’ show, then, is not a version of Peter Pan that anyone will have seen before. His researches led Wills to “grab from all sources,” including a screenplay for a silent film that Barrie composed, as well as incorporating a line that has always been cut from the play, but which Wills restores.

For Wills, the play, in its Edwardian setting, has always been to some degree about “what childhood means.” Granted, there are highly un-PC aspects of the play Barrie wrote—with Indians as savages and girls as domestic servants in-waiting—but Wills wants to retain those aspects to indicate how childish imaginations work. The question this should raise, among modern—adult—audiences (Wills’ show is not designed as an entertainment for children) is “what did I grow up on?”

Wills stresses how all of us, in our fantasies, incorporate the materials that have left their mark on our imaginations, the images that arise from whatever dimly remembered tales and films and shows and cartoons of our youth. Certainly, for generations in the U.S. since the fifties, the prevailing common denominator has been Disney, but in earlier eras the stereotypes of the day—in children’s adventure stories—would’ve done that work. Peter Pan and his adventures, then, becomes the kind of tale children themselves might invent as a defense against the grown-up world of war and chaos, even as they invent manageable villains—a pirate (Captain Hook)—and an exotic maiden (Tiger Lily), a fairy (Tinkerbell), and a mother figure (Wendy), for sentimental reasons.

In Wills’ production we may hope to see, rescued from the preciousness of Disney and the more upbeat aspects of Broadway, a Peter Pan grown-up at last.

Yale School of Drama presents Peter Pan Directed and adapted by Dustin Wills

Yale University Theatre December 13-19, 2013